Understand your buyers journey to the sale

Convert more customers by mapping our their journey

When you are just getting started in e-commerce, it is essential that you truly take the time to understand your buyer’s journey to the sale.

There are so many different roads to follow when you’re just opening up your shop and or even as you become more established. Is important to continuously come back to the fundamentals and truly understand your buyers journey to the sale.

Ecommerce shop owners want to move right from awareness to conversions. Many people start with getting more traffic to the site, but without understanding the steps it takes to get to a transaction for their unique e-commerce store, it is easy to have lots of traffic and not necessarily a lot of sales.

If you’re able to move your conversion rate just slightly, you can see our much larger return on investment for any traffic you’re sending as well as organic content.

We will walk through a typical journey to the sale for a few different price points.

If you are selling a high and item (which we typically define as over $100 or more), you will have a different journey than someone who is selling items that are lower price point and more impulse buys.

AWARENESS

The first stage of your customer's journey is awareness.

You can have the best product in the world, but if no one knows that you exist, no one will walk to your shop. You have to have a compelling reason for people to walk into the shop. We often talk about this as if you have a physical location and people are walking by the store.

What compels them to come in? Is a beautiful display in the window? Are you clear that your products are actually tailored for them? What is it that helps people be aware that you exist and have a solution for them?

ENGAGE

Once you’ve identified what sets you apart in the awareness stage, it is time to think about the engage stage. While people might have been introduced to your shop, they might need more education before they purchase from you.

Again talking about what this second the real world, imagine someone walking into your shop. What kind of questions are they asking about the products you sell? What’s the main selling point as you’re having conversations in person with your customers?

Do people love that your items are made in the United States? Do people love that it’s unique and one-of-a-kind items? Do you people think that it’s hard to find what you’re selling?

What do people need to learn more about to be engaged with your brand?

At this point, many people want to move directly to a sale. Again if you sell a lower price point item, this might be a time that people are willing to invest in your brand even though they don’t know you very well. However, if you’re selling a higher priced item (a hundred dollars and above), you will need to think about what your strategy has around the subscribed stage.

SUBSCRIBE

How can you get people who engage with your brand to opt-in to want to learn even more?

For e-commerce shops, many people employ a coupon strategy. However, that’s not the only thing you can do here. Here are some ideas below:

You can do a monthly giveaway that people enter their email to be eligible.

You can do a free gift with purchase.

You can have an instant download guide where they learn more about what you’re selling.

Once you had someone subscribe then they are much more likely to learn about your business and complete a purchase. We have clients who have a 25% placed order rate in their nurture sequence for email marketing. That means a quarter of people who get to the subscribe stage end up purchasing.

CONVERT

That brings us to the next stage which is the convert stage. This is what everyone wants to get to right away in their e-commerce shops, but as you can see if we lay on the framework it’s much more repeatable to drive traffic and get people to be aware of your shop, and then go through the steps above to move people to conversion.

In a conversion stage, someone trusts you enough to exchange money with you and place their order.

For most ecommerce shops, this is where shop owners stop. However, it is very lucrative to keep engaging with people past the conversion stage and get them really excited about your brand to build a loyal following.

EXCITE

Once they’ve made their first purchase, maybe they would want to come back in the shop if you just reminded them or educated them about what goes with what they purchased.

An example of high-end jewelry is once they’ve purchased a pair of diamond earrings, you can get them excited about getting the matching necklace.

You could also offer them a discount if they buy another item within a certain time window. It gets them excited about the purchase they’ve already made and continuing to engage with your brand.

After the excite stage there are three more stages that will elaborate more for more advanced strategy.

Comment below: what stage are you doing for your customer's journey to the sale?